IN ANCIENT Greece, the Oracle at Delphi was known for the ability to predict the future; at the entrance to the Delphic temple read a simple inscription: Know thyself. Indeed, this lesson remains relevant today; in order to channel the future, one first needs knowledge of himself.
This message is lost on Dr. Serge Trifkovíc, author of "Sword of the Prophet," who delivered a lecture entitled "Islam: What the West Needs to Know" last Thursday here at the University. Trifkovíc argued that the origins of Islam made it an inherently violent and undemocratic religion. He predicts that conflict between Islam and the West will continue, and his solution to the current problems with the Islamic world is to leave the region alone because Western reconciliation with Islam is impossible.
While I do not necessarily disagree with anything that Trifkovíc had to say about Islam particularly, making such arguments in a vacuum while ignoring centuries of Western history is simply absurd. The arguments that Trifkovíc advocates are flawed because he does not recognize similar traits among Christianity and other religions.
It is essential to study Islamic history alongside Western history in order to see that there are parallel interactions between the two which better explain the current problems within radical Islam. Studying the Muslim world in isolation causes Trifkovíc to miss the true nature of Islamic extremism, which is political and economic discontent.
Trifkovíc argued that the very origins of Islam with its prophet Muhammad made Islam a violent religion at odds with Western values. According to Trifkovíc, Muhammad was a violent leader who justified killing non-Muslims through his holy teachings. He claimed that "14 centuries provide clues about the true nature of Islam and this nature is fundamentally violent."
Trifkovíc and his cohorts use culture to explain the current extremism in Islam and, at the same time, ignore the various negative things that have occurred in Western history. The Spanish inquisition was firmly based on Christian justifications in order to torture and murder countless people, but no reasonable person would then claim that Christianity is an inherently violent religion.
Christianity has also been used to justify such crimes against humanity as slavery and imperialism. American slavery alone claimed the physical lives, to say nothing of the spiritual lives, of 30 to 60 million people according to slavery scholar David Stannard. Clearly, the crimes in Western history have been just as, if not more bloody, than those of the Islamic world.
Just as putting the sins of the Western world on trial does not then indict the West's dominant religion, Christianity, so too is it profoundly misguided to indict the entire Islamic world for the radical violence of a small sect. I am not equating the horrible things done in the name of Christianity as exactly the same as the things done in the name of Islam, but they are similar in that both, indeed all religions, can be perverted and used to justify crimes against humanity.
By simply focusing on the culture of the region, Trifkovíc and other culturists ignore the various problems in the Muslim world that have partially led to Islamic extremism. Almost all countries in the region are ruled by authoritarian regimes, many of which are backed by Western support. These governments limit the expression of legitimate political grievances; they are often corrupt and do not fairly distribute wealth among the population. For example, Saudi Arabia has the largest oil reserves in the world and makes billions of dollars through oil revenue and yet the current unemployment rate is at 13 percent. Moreover, the Saudi government is the ninth most authoritarian regime out 167 countries in the world according to the Economist's Democracy Index. In these circumstances radicals may easily corrupt religion with the help of a discontented public in order to establish a radical Islamic empire.
Only when we realize that our own history contains the black mark of religious extremism can we engage properly the problems of Islamic extremism.The problems of radical Islam are in some ways universal and cannot easily be ignored by "experts" who rely on ignorance. People may manipulate any religion to do horrible things, but there is nothing intrinsically wrong with one religion as opposed to another. When we come to this realization, we can start to address the real causes of Islamic extremism by improving the lives of people in the region, instead of demonizing a religion without understanding it.
Sam Shirazi's column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at sshirazi@cavalierdaily.com.
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